Video: Using the Shadow/Highlight adjustment filter

So, up till now, we've been basically building our story elements. We've been putting pieces together and creating this overall scene that tells a story. Now its time to start kind of locking down things and begin to prepare it for the painting aspect of all this. And so what I want to do now is, while I still have all of these elements in various layers, is start to play around with the tonality of them, somewhat. And again, this will be in the service of basically adding or strengthening the mood that I want to impart within this scene.

Learn to think like a painter and render images that look like they were created with oils or acrylics, using the latest digital artist's tools. Author and artist John Derry introduces the process of interpreting a photograph into a painted work of art. He begins by explaining his system of visual vocabularies, which describe how to replace the visual characteristics of a photograph with that of expressive painting, and also shares the custom brush sets and actions he uses to achieve these results in Adobe Photoshop. The course also covers working with filters, layers, effects, and more to add further detail and texture.

Using the Shadow/Highlight adjustment filter

So, up till now, we've been basically building our story elements.We've been putting pieces together and creating this overall scene that tells a story.Now its time to start kind of locking down things and begin to prepare it forthe painting aspect of all this.And so what I want to do now is, while I still have all of these elements invarious layers, is start to play around with the tonality of them, somewhat.And again, this will be in the service of basically adding or strengthening themood that I want to impart within this scene.

We're going to use a couple tricks here in the next couple segments to be ableto work on a couple different parts of this image just to start to get whatmy vision of it is.And, keep in mind, my vision of this and your vision of this could be different,and especially if you take some of the lessons that you get out of this courseand apply it to an idea that you have,your vision of it is going to be completely different than mine, so what you're gettingthroughout this course is, you know, a thin slice into my way of doing things,and it's very unique to the way that I do it.

You may find that these techniques work great for you, but you'll apply them anduse them in totally different ways.So, don't feel like what I'm showing you here is, this is the one way to do things.This is just a way to do things, and hopefully, some of these techniques canparlay themselves into the way that you want to affect an image or tell a story.Now, what we're going to start with is the castle itself.And I'm going to take advantage of the shadow and highlight feature thatallows me to play with kind of adjusting each component of that, the shadowsand the highlights.

And I'm going to start off by kind of going to the castle layer here, and we'll goup to our Image menu to Adjustments to Shadows/Highlights.And I want to show you a couple things right here.Did you see how that changed when that opened up?I don't like the way this changes every time it opens up, and that's because bydefault, Photoshop has the shadows turned up.You know, if no adjustment's been made yet, its going to look like this.That's how it looked before we came to it.If you don't want to see that change every time you open up Shadows/Highlights,go down here to the bottom and you may have to open up your dialog.

It shows up like this by default, so you might want to open this up with theShow More Options option, just make sure you have everything turned down andthen you can say Save As Defaults, and so we can say Cancel now.And now when I go to Shadows/Highlights it doesn't change. That's the way I like it.So that's, that's a little thing that I wanted to show you.Now, I want to start to darken up this scene a bit give, it a little more mystery.And so with the highlights, see how I can start to turn this down? But there's onething that's wrong, and this is where we're going to have to start consideringthe layers and how they interact.

You can see in the shadows that we've applied with the tree limb, see how they'returning kind of brown, that's because that's on a different layer.So it's going to act differently than if it were all of a single layer.So the first thing I want to do is, rather than just adjust the castle, I'm going tocancel out of this, and I'm going to collapse these two together.Now, as we go throughout this title, keep in mind that at various spots in theprocess, it's going to become necessary to collapse things.

Sometimes, in fact in a little while here, we're going to collapse this whole thingdown to a single layer.I really advise you to keep track as you go forward of anything that you thinkyou may want to adjust later on and go change.You always want to make sure that you're keeping a layered version around so that,rather than have some major surgery,it's very difficult to correct something, you could think of it as, oh, if Ijust had that on an individual layer it would have been so much easier.Always keep that in mind as you go forward, so that you keep a versionthat's layered. And I can tell you that having gone through this process to dothis image already, you wouldn't believe how many versions of this image I have.

I probably have 20 or 30 versions of the image from beginning to end.And that's all so I can always get back if I want to just go back a couple ofsteps. The more you save layered versions of images as you move forward, youwant to be able to have those so that you can make changes.And one way to think of it is, any time you think you may want to get back tosomething or any time you're going to collapse things, always save the imagefirst, and then collapse, and that way you can always get back.So, that's just a little lesson, but it's hard learned, because you'lleventually do it and not save it and you'll realize how much more convenient itwould have been to have saved the layered version.

What I want to do is here is I'm going to collapse my shadow layer down onto thecastle, so I select that layer and I'm just going to use Command or Control+E todrop that onto the layer beneath it, which is the castle layer.So now, I now have the shadow and the castle as all part of one layer.And now I can go back to my Shadows/Highlights and not get that funnycoloration that we saw before.So we'll go back to Shadows/Highlights and I'm going to adjust my highlights.

Now, see, now that's not, you know, I'll over do it, but you can eventually,with Shadows/Highlights, make colors look funny anyway, but it's not as much of aproblem as it was before.So I'm going to do that.Let's also take a look at shadows, I was just going to check both.See how I can now kinda open up those shadows a little bit.So, there's no right or wrong answer to this.I always call this kind of work seasoning to taste. Everybody's going to have adifferent way they want this to look.So, season to taste is just where it's open to interpretation how you want todo it. And I'll always check with turning this on and on to see what I've done.

And remember, too, that what we're trying to do here is move this farther andfarther away from how a camera looks at it and more how human vision looks at it.So, now that I look at that, earlier, I thought it looked fine, but when I startto see it kind of crunched down a bit there In the dynamic range,I like that more, so I'm going to go with that.And I can also go to the background layer, and I can also do the same thing withit, and just see if it's going to make any difference.So once again, we'll go to Shadows/Highlights and let's see.

Yeah, see how that, we're getting much more definition in the sky? I like that.I'll also just check what the shadows do, and actually, that kind of has a nice look.Because what we want to do here is, this background is farther away, and sothere's going to be some atmosphere between us and those elements.And the more distant items become, the more they kind of lose color and get lighter.So by actually kind of turning this down, you can see how it's effecting thelandscape back there.

I can actually use this to kind of lighten that up.So I'm going to go with something like that. There we go.So, what we've done here is we've used Shadows/Highlights in a way that lets uskind of interactively adjust the look of this.And in fact, if I go back a couple of steps here, temporarily, see, that's wherewe were, and there's where we are now.So now we've got this adjusted more to a way that, again, according to myvision, the way I want to see this appear, looks correct.

So, we're going to with this and then in the next video, we're going to take advantageof yet another tone correcting feature, and then we'll be pretty much ready tostart the process of painting.

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